He never ages, he never gets seriously injured, he never stops boozing or chasing skirt, he never settles for anything less than the best cars, clothes, accommodation and weapons, and he never takes time off from saving the world from disaster to muddle through the mundane quotidiana that plague us all. Like Father Christmas and Charlie Brown, to name two other fictional characters based loosely on real-life models, Bond comforts because he's always the same - a kind of idealised icon of what we wish we were, and our relationship to him is like the portrait's to Dorian Gray. The sexy secret agent carries on, frozen in his dinner-jacketed, vodka-martini-swilling glory, while we postwar daddies and baby-boom lads who birthed and adore him rot slowly into obsolescence.
Although Bond is nowhere near the most ubiquitous of big-screen movie characters, somehow - with a mere 21 screen incarnations - he feels more like the ongoing ambient background noise of the culture of cinema than the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood or Abraham Lincoln. That is partly because Bond films are so regular: roughly one every other year since Dr No was released on October 5 1962, which makes next month his 40th anniversary. It is partly because they are so big: Bond pictures to date (including the non-canonical Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again) have grossed nearly $3.5bn worldwide. And it is partly because the figure of Bond has so thoroughly coincided with a certain strain of the British national image, a dominant ideal of modern masculinity and a variety of cinema in which movie-going approximates the repetitiveness of religious sacrament.
He has certainly been an economic lion. MGM/UA, the company that releases the Bond films in the US, virtually stays in business for that sole purpose. In late August, Wall Street analysts upgraded their rating of the company's stock on the mere basis of seeing some footage of the next Bond film, Die Another Day, which isn't due in cinemas until late November. And the number of licensees who have lined up to have Bond wear, consume, drive or otherwise sport their products is a litany of global brand names: Aston Martin, Lotus, BMW and Bentley automobiles, Rolex and Omega watches, Ericsson phones, Calvin Klein sunglasses, Parker pens and, of course, Walther guns.
But something other than money, even vast piles of it, keeps Bond going. Although he has seemed to stay frozen in time, Bond has actually undergone a series of very subtle metamorphoses. Via the variety of actors who have played the role, the evolving scale and seriousness of the films, the various imitators over the years and the relation of the movies to the culture and politics of the real world, Bond movies have largely managed the trick of seeming both hidebound and vital at once, cannily changing with the times and always staying the same.
To trace this evolution, we start not on the screen but on the page, in 1953, when the journalist, stockbroker, intelligence operative and undistinguished Etonian Ian Fleming unleashed upon the world Casino Royale, the first of the 14 novels and short story collections concerning the adventures of James Bond that he would publish before his death in 1964.
As careful readers of the series might discern, the hero of these works, James Bond, was born in Scotland in 1924 and orphaned by his parents' mountain climbing accident eight years later. He entered Eton in 1938, was expelled for sexual misadventures after two years (the precocious little devil was not yet 16!), lied about his age to join the navy in 1941, finished the war a commander and joined MI6, receiving his licence to kill in 1950 and decoration as a CMG in 1954. His only marriage took place on January 1 1962, but the festivities were rather dampened by the bride's assassination on the wedding night.
In 1954, the American television network CBS glimpsed the potential of the Bond character and broadcast an adaptation of Casino Royale starring Barry Nelson as an American card shark named Jimmy Bond, with Peter Lorre, God love him, as the villainous gambler and Soviet agent Le Chiffre. The one-hour teleplay was played out on two sets and featured no fast cars or bathing-suit-clad women, and it didn't sport the classic theme (although the great Jerry Goldsmith did score it). However, it is generally reckoned to be a faithful adaptation of Fleming's textures and his vision of the character, a game if slight start to the most profitable and famous film series in the history of the medium.
It would be a while, though, before Bond reached that status or even showed the potential to do so. The novels poured forth regularly, but they had only a modest readership, and nobody was interested in making films of them. (Among those who passed on Bond was Sir Alexander Korda.) In 1961, Fleming, in the aftermath of a heart attack, sold the film rights to the entire series of novels not to some American conglomerate or storied British company but an unlikely duo of independent producers who had just teamed up after freeing themselves of other business relationships.
Harry Saltzman, late of Woodfall films (where he partnered John Osborne and Tony Richardson to back such seminal films as Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and The Entertainer), snared the rights from Fleming and then went sharking around for money. Through the auspices of Wolf Mankowitz, he met Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the divorced partner of Warwick films, which had most recently been responsible for The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Their estimable credits aside, the two were classic movie-world shady characters. Saltzman was reckoned by many British film-makers to be one degree removed from a Mafioso (a romantic misconception, as it happened), and Broccoli had learned the film game at the feet of no less a cut-throat than Howard Hughes.
The two didn't put together much of a budget for their first venture - Bond books still hadn't proven international mega-hits. A bankroll of just under $1m meant that the series wouldn't begin, as the producers had hoped, with the effects-and-locations-rich Thunderball but rather with the more modestly scaled Dr No. They decided not to spend too much of their money on a leading man: James Bond, they declared, would be played by an unknown. The truth was that they did not have the money to hire any of their initial choices - David Niven, Richard Burton, James Mason. So they went through a casting process that resulted in the role being offered to a former merchant seaman, bodybuilder, milkman and clothing model from Edinburgh, Sean Connery, whose previous screen incarnations included a thumb-breaker in the Soho crime story The Frightened City and a kind-hearted romantic in Darby O'Gill and the Little People.
Over the course of five films in as many years, Connery would come to set a four-decade standard for the role of James Bond. And that very fact indicates how underrated a performer he was, even that early in his career. Climbing into the tuxedo at the age of 31, he wasn't educated like Bond, he had had an abortive naval career unlike the character's, he knew none of the luxuries of life that Bond considered staples, and he even wore a hairpiece (two, actually: one served better than the other for action sequences).
But Connery had wit and presence. He bore himself, as Broccoli put it at the time, "like he has balls", and he had an instinctive feel for the character's essential coldness, calculation and ruthlessness to the point of sadism. He didn't growl and mumble like the popular young English actors of the moment, the Albert Finneys and Tom Courtenays. Nor did he aspire toward theatrical lyrical roughness like Richard Burton or Peter O'Toole. In essence, he turned Bond into Connery, ensuring that every subsequent actor who took the role would, like painters following Picasso, have to address the original.
If the casting of Connery weren't coup enough, the timing of the release of Dr No was pure kismet. The vivacious young American president, John Kennedy, had recently declared himself a fan of Fleming's writing; From Russia With Love was among the volumes he listed as his 10 favourite books (a designation that he came to regret, as it provided his enemies with a cheap laugh at what they perceived to be his geopolitical childishness). Further, Bond's proclivities toward hard liquor, quick sex and high-stakes gambling evinced a hedonism that would have been smiled upon by Hugh Hefner and Frank Sinatra, to name two swinging kingpins of the moment.
And the escalation of the cold war into something that seemed actually able to turn the world to cinders at any moment made Fleming's doomsday plots resemble a frightening cross of reportage and nightmare.
In this context, Bond was not only an action hero but a reminder of the sort of world the good guys - the British and Americans and their respective espionage and military services - were fighting for, a place where one dressed, drank, drove and screwed only the finest, where money was readily available but not as valuable as style, where villains were scarred, sexually frustrated and brutish, and heroes had all the flair and seasoning you would want in a best mate or head of state.
Through the 1960s, Bond's stock rose both as a cinematic and literary property and as a symbol of the emergent new Britain. He wasn't quite a Swinging London type - too old, too much in bed with the establishment, too enamoured of the mores and creature comforts and vices of the greying generation. But he was perhaps something more: a palpable icon of British economic, stylistic and, yes, sexual potency, one of the few emblems of the "special relationship" between the US and the UK. If there was, in some fusty intellectual corners, a resistance to Bond's pleasure-seeking antics and his geopolitical hard line, it was more than swept away by the box-office for the films, which reached a height in 1965 with Thunderball and its global gross of $141m (roughly $805m in contemporary terms).
As the decade wore on and the hypothetical nightmares of the cold war took a back seat to the reality of Vietnam, Bond came to seem less a viable political operative than a Mardi Gras float, complete with giganticised special effects, increasingly elaborate sets and villains who seemed less from the eastern bloc than from the moon. The rough and tumble of Dr No and From Russia With Love gradually morphed into the outer-space hijackings and hollowed-out volcano that served as the villain's lair in You Only Live Twice.
Another Bondish spy served as a counterpoint to the 007 series, and broke open the 1960s spy craze. Harry Palmer, a kind of back-up Bond developed for the screen by Harry Saltzman in case the 007 franchise petered out, had first appeared as a nameless agent in a series of novels by Len Deighton. For The Ipcress File, the initial film adaptation of the books, Saltzman had hired Michael Caine (again through the matchmaking offices of Wolf Mankowitz) in the lull between Zulu and Alfie.
There were other Bond imitators at the time: Matt Helm, played by that walking wink Dean Martin, and Derek Flint, a somewhat more earnest American knock-off who was nevertheless meant as a joke. And there was an insanely satirical version of Casino Royale with multiple James Bonds played by, among others, David Niven and Woody Allen. But Palmer had begun seriously, and raced from realism to parody in three years: a heady pace even in a postmodern age. Once he had hit the end of that cycle, Palmer was wisely put in deep freeze, and Caine went on to bigger and better things.
The spectacle of Caine's success surely nagged at Connery, who pried himself loose of Bond at the end of the 1960s for a couple of years (and some sorry films), only to find himself playing the role once again in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. In his absence, the role went to another newcomer, model and actor George Lazenby, who wasn't nearly as bad as everybody remembers but not exactly worth calling home about, either. His one film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, felt more akin to the early, quasi-realistic Bond films. It has grown in reputation since its release (even as, in adjusted dollars, it remains the lowest-grossing film in the series). But once Connery was back in the fold the film was quickly forgotten. In retrospect, its chief point of interest may have been that Lazenby was from Australia, marking what would be an amazingly catholic set of origins for the various Bonds alongside the Scottish Connery, the Welsh-born Timothy Dalton, the Irish Pierce Brosnan, and the fellow who followed Lazenby in the role, Londoner Roger Moore.
Ah, Roger Moore. Just as we must live with the fact that today's boy bands sell more records than the Beatles did in the 1960s, we must acknowledge that all but one of Moore's Bond films (The Man With the Golden Gun) grossed more than all of Connery's except Goldfinger and Thunderball. Of course, the fact has to do with the mechanisms of economic inflation and the coincidence of Moore's reign with the advent of the modern Hollywood blockbuster - The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars and all that - rather than with a public preference for Moore's work over Connery's. Indeed, until the heyday of chesty rascals Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it is hard to recall a film superstar whose work was so simultaneously mocked and well attended as Moore's. But there it is nevertheless: Bond was never more popular around the world, probably, than when Roger Moore played him.
Moore had tested for the role and lost it narrowly to Connery a decade before assuming it in 1973 with Live and Let Die, but it is hard to imagine that he could have launched the series as well as Connery did. Rather, Moore entered a full-steam enterprise and stood by in a kind of numb, avuncular bemusement as it progressed from action thrillers to special effects comedies and on to near irrelevance. Just as it was becoming increasingly unlikely that MI6 would save the world, Bond in the 1970s and early 1980s drifted out of reality altogether, and Moore presided over the transformation like the dim-bulb eldest son of a decaying, old family.
Perhaps it was because he was so much older than Connery (at 46, he was the oldest first-time Bond, and he was staring down the barrel of 60 when he finally gave up the role); perhaps because his films depended less on what he brought to the part than what was happening around him; perhaps because he always looked bloated and taxidermed and toupeed - but Moore always gave off a bit of a Ronald Reagan air: slightly out of touch, distinctly self-satisfied, standing pregnantly like a beauty queen or a game show contestant waiting to be crowned or given a bouquet of roses.
By the time Moore was done with James Bond, the once-thrilling character seemed less a dashing stud than an exhausted eunuch, still drawing in large, gullible crowds but as irrelevant as the rhetorical sabre-rattling of the global superpowers, who everybody knew were not really going to engage in an all-or-nothing fight. And it didn't help matters that Connery had returned for the golden pay cheque of Never Say Never Again, a bastard 1983 film that grew out of litigation dating back to the 1950s and which concerned an over-the-hill (but still younger than Moore!) Bond sent by his bosses to a fat farm to get back into shape for the service.
In this context, it's understandable that the Bond franchise was next put in the hands of an actual actor, the impossibly handsome Shakespearean actor Timothy Dalton - a full decade older than the Connery of Dr No, yes, but nobody's idea of an untested male model or a cream-puff TV star. Dalton's debut gave the film-makers the opportunity to steer the character back to Fleming's vision of bare knuckles and high living. The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill are as plain and brutal as Connery's first two films and felt like a shot of adrenalin in Bond's stiffening body. And Dalton, being a proper actor, played the role as written: hard, violent, mean.
For fans who had grown up on Roger Moore's cartoonish films, however, this combination of realism and sadism was a slap in the face. In Dalton's mouth, Bond's signature one-liners seemed throwaways, not scene-cappers, and the character's thirst for inflicting pain seemed to overshadow the glamour, gadgetry and giggly babes. To the most undiscriminating true believers, he was a disaster.
The last of Dalton's films appeared in 1989, coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union and marking what would have been a nice historical coincidence: the conclusion of the cold war bringing an end to the career of the last secret agent still fighting it. But that wasn't why Dalton's tenure in the role was nearly the shortest, second only to Lazenby's. After Licence to Kill, Cubby Broccoli, who had bought Harry Saltzman out of the series just after the start of Moore's reign, was in increasingly frail health, and a series of legal struggles among various parties with claims to the franchise ate up any time he could devote to the film business. When the series finally relaunched in 1995 with GoldenEye, Broccoli was too ill to visit the set (he died six months after its release) and a new Bond was in place: Pierce Brosnan.
Like Moore, Brosnan had once lost the role to the previous fellow and was best known for his television work. But Brosnan had glamour, there was no denying it. And he had the look and the wit and even the acting chops. The public at large deemed him a perfect Bond, and the films, now in the hands of Barbara Broccoli, Cubby's daughter, revived to welcome him. His first three outings - GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough - all grossed in the neighbourhood of $350m worldwide, the most in the history of the series.
Brosnan may never scare Dalton off the Shakespearean stage or take the screen with the natural authority of Connery, but he is nevertheless a vast improvement on Roger Moore - something actually seems to be going on behind his eyes other than curiosity about the luncheon menu - and he suits the vigorously branded corporate Bond of the contemporary era perfectly well.
Brosnan's chief strength is his ability to play straight and wink at the same time - in this capacity he is arguably the best Bond of all. According to his biography, the first film he ever saw was Goldfinger (which means he somehow never entered a cinema until age 11), but even if that's not true it gives us an idea of how he manages to inhabit Bond so plausibly in an era when he has been so successfully lampooned in the Austin Powers films. With a fetching smirk in the corner of his eyes, Brosnan tells us that yes, of course, he knows that Bond is a goof. But he is a goof who enthralled him as a boy - the Bond fantasy of adventure, high life, women, action, derring-do, speed, violence, cool weapons and the best of everything. So why not, he asks us, give in?
It's a frankly hedonistic approach that darned near echoes the original Bond vibe that enthralled Jack Kennedy, Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. And you submit, despite yourself, to the sheer popcorn silliness of it. That raw, subrational, visceral, have-your-way-with-me response assures us that as long as there is an actor born somewhere in the Commonwealth who looks good holding a gun in formal wear (Clive Owen? Rupert Everett? Russell Crowe? Christian Bale? Jeremy Northam? Hugh Jackman? Hugh Grant?) there will always, bless us, be a Bond.
· Shawn Levy is film critic for the Oregonian and author of Ready, Steady, Go: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool and Rat Pack Confidential.
